The Engineer: Radar spots climate anomalies

Article dated 5/24/05

British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bath have installed a remote sensing radar in Antarctica that aid in the investigation of the Mesosphere. It also tracks the many meteors that burn up in the mesosphere.

Wired News: Super Water Kills Bugs Dead

Article by Skip Kaltenjeuser, 5/16/2005

The upshot is that a US company has developed a super-oxgenated water that is perfectly drinkable, but kills bacteria, viruses, and spores. Cool, right? Shelf-life of over a year.

This reminds me of a short story in which an ice that sank was invented. Short story short-- it took over the world and killed the planet. So, I guess the solution to pollution with the super water is dilution, but it still wouldn't be good for your fish tank.

Wired News: Asteroid Warnings Toned Down

Article by David Cohn, 4/16/05.

I like NEO stories but this is pretty funny. It's a slow news day when newspapers publish panic headlines about NEOs that have a 1 in 45 chance of hitting the earth in the next 25 years. Wikipedia has this article on the Torino Scale.

With all of these scales, whether from DHS or the meteorologist, they're supposed to clarify the actual threat, but the number of words it takes to explain a mango warning probably out weigh the original story.

...The colors haven't changed from the old system, but the explanation of what each color means has. Asteroids in the green section used to be deemed 'events meriting careful monitoring,' but now are considered 'normal.' And a level 6 object was described as capable of causing 'global catastrophe.' Now these, too, only merit the concern of astronomers...Not all the changes paint a rosier picture. Under the old system, a level 10 warning used to be described as 'causing global climatic disaster.' The new description reads 'a certain collision capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.'

Yay! ADS adds RSS Feeds

Pointed out by SD Librarian.

Ok, so ADS (the NASA Astrophysics Data System) is really THE astro database. They've had e-mail alerts, but unfortunately not for affiliations. Now you can subscribe to a search in your feed reader and be kept up to date without filling your in box. Still no affiliations, but great nonetheless.

Notices of the AMS: The Importance of MathML to Mathematics Communication

The link here is to the table of contents. Free registration required to retrieve the full text PDF.

Robert Miner. "The Importance of MathML to Mathematics Communication." Notices of the AMS v52 n5 (May 2005): 532-8.

One of my lines of inquiry has been how to search math -- I mean really search it. What if you don't know what the equation is called? Why can't you do a substructure search like you do in chemistry? Shouldn't math be easier to search than chemistry? Instead, it's worse that image searching.

MathML is supposed to fix some of these things. Miner is very enthusiastic in extolling its virtues. The only problem is that mathematicians don't seem to be jumping on the bandwagon. They seem to really like LaTeX.

One physicist has created some plugins for WordPress and Movabletype to convert TeX equations to MathML. Cool...

The New York Times|Technology: Pogue tests the new Oxyride battery

Free reg. req. David Pogue. "Can a New Disposable Battery Change Your Life? Parts of It, Maybe" NYT, 4/7/2005

He's a technology writer, not a scientist, but Pogue gives these new batteries a test. Not bad, but probably not as useful as NiMH. The Cnet article has a little more on the actual technology involved. If I ever find the relevant patents, I'll update this.

NASA - Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2005

From NASA's neat Science Feed
"On April 8th in North America crescent-shaped sunbeams will dapple the ground during a partial solar eclipse." There's a timetable from NASA's GSFC that tells you when it will happen in your neck of the woods. People in the south will have a much better show but this article points out some neat tricks.

news @ nature.com - Black holes 'do not exist'

by Philip Ball 31 March 2005; doi:10.1038/news050328-8
"These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims." Isn't that something out of StarWars? So the idea is that stars don't collapse and become black holes; rather they become filled with dark energy. The author says that this explains some of the event horizon wierdness. The original article is: Chapline G. Arxiv, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503200 (2005).

NASA is podcasting

They've had feeds and multimedia reports, but now they're in the popular and easy to find format.

The Engineer Online - Reducing the scale of drag

I always like posting about coatings for ship hulls. Previous posts looked at more chemical methods to prevent barnicles, etc. I think I even posted about the vorticies created by dolphin skin. The method linked above uses a mechanical method. They created a coating that mimicks the placoid scales of sharks "by creating a plastic and rubber composite coating made from billions of raised diamond-shaped patterns, each measuring 15 microns. Each diamond also contains seven raised ribs."

Closer to Truth > How Does Basic Science Defend America?

I love this show. Luckily Howard University Television (WHUT, Channel 32 in DC) actually carries this. The show is a panel discussion with experts from different fields with different points of view.

While supporting basic science research is indeed essential for protecting national security, can that be our sole primary motivation for pursuing knowledge of the natural world? When asked by Congress whether Fermilab, the expensive atomic accelerator, would contribute to the national defense, its founding director replied that the contribution would be "… not to the defense of the nation, but rather to what made the nation worth defending."

This session is very timely -- for NASA and EPA, too. In government, it seems that they're really pulling away from having scientists on the payroll (not as contractors) who do basic research that may not have an immediate practical use.
Sean Carroll, a Physicist at the University of Chicago, recently posted on why do we do science that isn't immediately practical (look back in his archives and you'll see more discussion of this).

StructuredBlogging.org > Semantic Web Comes to the Blog

SC (now at PubSub, the guys who are developing this) pointed this out. It's not as good as Reger was/is, but since it's a plug-in to WordPress it might get some play. I think that's been the problem with other tools -- they haven't caught on. You need a critical mass of bloggers adding content to make it really useful. So if you're blogging on WordPress, consider giving it a shot. I still need to find a book plug-in for my blogger blogs... one that links to Open Worldcat, of course.

Science.gov adds (e-mail) alerts!

Pointed out on ResourceShelf.

Pretty cool. I'll get my first alert on Monday so then I'll know how cool. Too bad they're not RSS. I wonder, too, how they compare to e-mail alerts from the database vendors that have versions of the databases covered by this?

Housekeeping

Added gigablast site search.
Removed the plug-in for commenting -- overdue, didn't realize I had both.

EV2 Adds RSS Feeds

Cross-posted to my LIS blog.

I was trying to figure out what search I would do that wouldn't provide any specific info from my place of work so disregard the subject...

Anyway, you can now get weekly search alerts/updates right in your aggregator. You have to be a subscriber ($$, of course). My e-mail alerts get to me on Fridays, so I'm guessing that's when the feed will be updated I'll come back and update this if not.
rss|engineering|databases

Physical Review Focus: Watching Atoms Move

See a video from a STM of a phase transition of a lead layer on silicon. Watch the video linked from this page pretty carefully at the about the halfway mark. Pretty cool. In the past, the STM haven't been stable enough so the scientists have just compared before and after images. The full article (subscribers only) is available: I. Brihuega, O. Custance, Rubén Pérez, and J. M. Gómez-Rodríguez. "Intrinsic Character of the (3×3) to (sqrt(3)×sqrt(3)) Phase Transition in Pb/Si(111)" Phys Rev Lett v94 046101 (4 Feb 2005).

PACS: 68.35.Rh, 68.35.Bs, 68.37.Ef, 71.15.Nc|physics
Updated: wacky font sizes

The Mathematics Survey

Pointed out in the NSDL Scout Report v4 n3 (Feb 11, 2005). Note: the journal's been linked from our internal portal for a while, this is just more about the project.

This ambitious project seeks to solve a lot of what's wrong with mathematics information right now. Two (1, 2) new books came out in the last year trying to help users and librarians make some sort of in road into finding necessary math. While the books are very good the fragmentation and compartmentalization of the math knowledge is so severe that it's almost a lost battle.

Pitman, from Berkeley, has envisioned an open access set of survey journals and encyclopedias indexed by MSC (subject) and interlinked by author and collaboration graphs. Really quite a broad sweeping plan. Sounds like it could be done on a wiki (with editorial review). He hopes that the end information will be heavily cited (thus findable in WoS) and searchable on Google Scholar, MathSci, and Zentralblatt Math.

The first part of this is the probability and stochastic processes electronic journal: Probability Surveys.

Link this, if you will, to my suggestions (1, 2) of using established classification codes for new projects, etc. Note: Pitman doesn't propose a whole new classification scheme, he suggests the use of MSC. Perhaps mathematicians and statisticians should tag their posts and web pages with MSC codes? Maybe they already do?

math|00-xx|openaccess

Human Factors: Special Section on Driver Distraction

(full text to subscribers only, nb: long-time institutional print subscribers might not realize that they can now register for online access... we're just getting this set up now)
This is a timely section. Everything from modeling to how age makes a difference in seeing traffic signs while involved in a conversation.

Also, RSS feed available for this and all other Extenza pubs.

updated (fixed a typo)

Preposterous Universe: Hallucinatory neurophysics

U Chi Physicist Sean Carroll describes this recent work in mathematical neurophysics. Essentially, describing in mathematical terms/wave equations the patterns of hallucinations.

But here is the punchline: patterns of hallucinations reflect normal modes of the neurons in the visual cortex. By "normal modes" we mean the characteristic patterns of vibration, just as for a violin string or the head of a drum. The idea is that a drug such as LSD can alter the ground state of the visual cortex, so that it becomes excited even in the absence of stimuli. In particular, certain oscillating patterns can appear spontaneously. Generally these would take the form of different configurations of straight lines in the cortex itself; however, due to the distortion in the map from our visual field to the brain, these appear to us as spirals, tunnels, and so on. Indeed, Cowan and collaborators have shown that these normal modes can successfully account for all of the basic forms of hallucination classified by Kluever decades ago.

Take time to read the comments, too. In the comments there's a comparison to other mathematical models of the brain which do not fit as well as these wave functions.

Nature: Schrodinger's mousetrap (fiction)

Ok, I'm hooked. The link above may only work for subscribers, but it is marked free -- Go to your local library if you don't have access.

There I was, browsing the covers of our scientific journals when I ran across this article. Turns out that it's a new short story broken up in to parts accross multiple issues. Why do our issues come so late? I'm not saying it's particularly well written, but what a neat idea.

The article has quantum entanglement, negative refraction...